1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to virus scans. More specifically, the present invention is directed to a system, computer program product and method of selecting sectors of a hard disk on which to perform a virus scan.
2. Description of Related Art
A computer virus is a program designed to install itself on a computer system without a user's permission or knowledge. The virus may attach itself to files, boot sectors of hard or floppy disks and/or other storage media and replicates itself, thus continuing to spread. In addition to replicating themselves, some viruses may also cause serious damage to an infected system and/or may negatively affect program and system performance.
To prevent viruses from entering a computer system, a user may either operate the computer system in a bubble (i.e., disconnect the computer system from all networks as well as remove or stop using all disk drives attached to the system), which is unfeasible in today's world, or use an anti-virus program. An anti-virus program is a program that checks or scans all data that is to be used by the computer system or stored on the computer system for viruses. If it finds that the data being scanned is infected by a virus, it may delete or quarantine the data.
Anti-virus programs conceptually reside between application programs and a computer's file system. This allows data that is requested by or is to be used by an application program to be scanned for viruses before it is actually used or stored in the file system. Some anti-virus programs may operate in real-time (i.e., they scan data for viruses at the time the data is to be used). Others may operate just before data is to be stored in the file system.
In either case, however, virus infected data may be stored in the file system. For example, if a computer system is updated when a virus scanner, especially a real-time virus scanner, is inactive (e.g., through safe-mode boots, booting from a CD, booting into a different OS, temporarily disabling a virus scan etc.), there may be virus-infected data stored in the file system. In such a case, the anti-virus program must ensure that the viruses are not executed or copied to other computers. Therefore, the anti-virus program must periodically scan the hard disk (i.e., the file system) of the computer system on which it is installed for infected data.
Performing a virus scan on a hard disk that may contain gigabits of data can be a rather resource-intensive (CPU and disk I/O) as well as time-consuming task. Therefore, instead of performing a virus scan on all data on a hard disk, a need exists for a system, computer program product and method of selecting sectors of a hard disk on which to perform the virus scan.